Flesh is Grass

Since, as Norm says, he is regrettable and I think he’s a pissant above his station, I put him next to Hassan Nasrallah and pockmark his hair with tiny Zionist dart holes.

Norm via Engage says it all.

See also David Hirsh’s rightful rebuke of Milne.

Although I cope, when I look at tables, P60s, payslips, &tc I slightly panic. I find reasons not to read the Business section of the Observer, which is the only paper I read (besides The Sun and the London Paper, but they don’t really count). It’s pretty pathetic and it’s one of the reasons I don’t write about tax even though tax is one of the most elemental aspects of any civilisation (maybe not the oil states). As you would gather from this, I have enough money. But this evening I realised I should really know what happened with the tax reforms last month so I had a bit of a look.

This recent budget, former Chancellor Gordon Brown had already decided that Chancellor Alistair Darling decided to scrap the 10p starting tax band (£5,435 - £7,755 I think) would be scrapped in order to fund a reduction in the 22p basic rate band down to 20p (22 million pay no more than this basic rate which is £8,955 - £36,000). The reason Darling did this is that he wanted to be able to say that basic rate, at which most people pay most of their tax, was the lowest in 75 years and that Labour had made “a family tax cut that provides support for those on middle incomes”.

Trouble is 5.5 million of the poorer households from this were going to lose an average of £120 per household, but the poorest households were going to be up to £232 worse off. Meanwhile food and fuel prices continue to rise (fuel by several hundred %) and great swathes of the population are ending the interest-free period of their mortgage repayments this year and in the coming couple.

There was a revolt from the Labour back benches, led by Frank Field.

Darling made adjustments. He decided to borrow £2.7 billion (our borrowing this year is now forecast at £46bn) in order to fund a raise in the personal (tax free) allowance by £600 from £5,435 to £6,035 for the year beginning 6th April 2008, meaning that 22 million people will gain an average of £120 and 600,000 people on low incomes will be taken out of tax altogether.

At the same time the higher rate threshold (at which people move from paying basic rate to the highest 40p tax band) was reduced by £1,200 from £36,000 to £34,800, meaning that 150,000 more people would make some contribution at this rate.

The Conservatives point out that, and Darling concedes, that only 80% of those who originally lost from the withdrawal of the starting rate are compensated. 1.1 million of the lowest earners on between £6,036 and £10, 050 will only halve their losses and will be charged an average of £112 more this year. It’s not clear whether they can claim money elsewhere in tax credits (this is fraught - hard to administrate and undignified for claimants) but these people - 1.1 million of the poorest - are the losers. This is nuts for a Labour government.

Newsnight is showing pictures of the injuries of members of the Zimbabwean Movement for Democratic Change who have been terribly beaten and tortured by Mugabe’s JOC central committee. Burns. Buttocks and palms beaten with rods to expose muscle and bone. China thinks it’s lost 50,000 people in the Sichuan earthquake. Myanmar estimates stretch to 100,000, many of whom are dead because the junta stopped aid workers from doing their work. The UN is currently working at only 20% capacity.

I sometimes entertain the possibility that one or two of the anti-Israel activists I’ve argued with during the boycott campaign are mentally ill. I’m as careful with them as I know how to be. But one aspect of the online part of the campaign to boycott Israel is the tendency for pro-boycotters to actually call their opponents mentally ill - ‘deranged’, ‘hysterical’, ‘nutters’, ‘crazy, and ‘paranoid’. This charge of madness levelled against Jews is an old one. Although antisemitism is itself a particularly paranoid political form, people who raise the alarm about it are themselves often labelled mad or paranoid.

It’s got ridiculous now. Even people who style themselves champions of Jews are calling Jews paranoid and even anti-Jewish anti-Zionist Jews are smarting from the same accusation. Jews are called willfully paranoid by people who think that the lifeblood of Jewishness is its ‘victim narrative‘. Paranoid for worrying about antisemitism when there’s hardly any Jewish blood on US or British streets, paranoid for questioning the ideology of boycotts or the insinuations of U.S. international relations academics like Mearsheimer and Walt. Paranoid for continuing to see the relevance of Jewish self-determination in a Jewish state.

The charge of madness isn’t sincere, though. Let’s just for a moment entertain the unrealistic scenario that Jews are paranoid, or paranoid Jews are paranoid because they are Jewish. Paranoia is a mental illness - what’s a helpful response?

In its advice for friends and family of people suffering from paranoid thoughts, Mind says that as well as ‘communicating honestly’ we should be:

“Avoiding confrontation. To tell someone they are stupid or talking rubbish is disrespectful, dismissive and unhelpful. It damages self-esteem, gives the impression that you do not care about the person, and is liable to make things worse.”

The possibility that somebody is mentally ill should bring the out sensitivity and compassion of their interlocutors. If you really think somebody you are having a theoretical argument with is unhinged, it would be most counterproductive, and callous, to use that as part of your argument.

So boycotters if who say so don’t really think that anti-boycotters are insane, maybe they think they’re fake. There’s a lot of talk of bad faith, smokescreens, distractions, shroud-waving, red herrings, straw men. There’s the boycott motion from UCU which contains the loophole clause ‘criticism of Israel cannot be construed as antisemitism’, and the boycott motion from Sussex Student Union implying artful use of antisemitism as a distractor: ‘There is nothing anti-Semitic … in condemning and taking action against the unethical, illegal policies of the Israeli government’.

That Jews raise concerns about antisemitism in bad faith is something that anti-Israel activists want us to take for granted, but when they lose this argument (note the late, fraught, efforts of extreme anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein to irradicate antisemitism from the British anti-Zionist movement), it isn’t unusual for them to adopt as their strategy the - similarly, they believe? - insincere charge of madness.

So either boycott advocates don’t believe the charge they’re making and are cynically playing on prejudices about people who suffer from insanity, or, if they do believe it, they’re cruel bigots.

I don’t think they believe it - but why, if boycotters think anti-boycotters are fake, do they also call them mad?

Some rambling, unsourced thoughts about the Stop the War Coalition.

A recent day began with a sustained barrage of online anti-Zionism, more at lunch, an evening listening to a Palestinian ex-combatant whose daughter was killed, he believes, by the IDF and who now seeks to convince other combatants that justice is better than revenge.

After that I collared somebody who heads up his local Stop the War Coalition where he studies. He was from overseas and extremely diplomatic and these two facts alone was enought to make me pause for thought. What, he doesn’t bark out slogans or quiver with rage at the mention of Israel? He’s not in StWC because he’s riddled with misplaced post-colonial guilt? Clearly I’m in danger of stereotyping these people. He cited Kipling and the white man’s burden as an influence for his quite undogmatic anti-imperialism. He didn’t have anything to say on Burma but he did allow that there could be grounds for intervention in the affairs of another state. He was looking broadly to engage Muslims in StWC but he wanted to be able to discuss things like the treatment of women, observing that it was Galloway’s move to the right which had ended RESPECT. He said that Israel was not a big issue and that in fact it never came up in StWC meetings before its affiliation with End the Siege - this is interesting though, because what about the 2006 ‘We Are All Hesbollah Now’ march? And regarding said march with said placards he denied central coordination and observed that when you’re in a coalition the only people you detests more than the ones you oppose are the ones you have to work with. He wished they were all like him, but they weren’t. He was very sanguine. I asked him what he meant by imperialism and he seemed surprised. I asked him if he had read the work of Lenin on the subject - he had not. Nor did he know what a ‘Eustie’ was and he blanked on Democratiya. But all the same I felt bad and even guilty about my strong antipathy to StWC.

I haven’t read the Lenin either, but broadly speaking he was on about the imperative towards a monopoly as the ultimate form of capitalism. StWC see what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan as symptoms of imperialism. They perceive in the huge profits of Haliburton the super-exploitation of the world’s poor countries. They see Iran as resisting the US rather than harbouring its own independent aspirations to power. Eustonians see things differently as democrats versus authoritarians. The US shoring up of Siniora’s ‘Western-backed’ government against Iranian interventions can be seen in the context of Iran’s bad record on democracy and human rights. StWC doesn’t criticise Iran - only the US, the UK and Israel. What StWC sees as imperialist tactics on the part of the US, the Eusties view as an opportunity for democracy and stability to the region, and - yes - trade. Trade after all is a distinctly un-ideological (or at least unprejudiced) activity. A healthy activity.
Anyway I had a look at the SWP and it’s front’s Stop the War sites today and it wasn’t good. StWC referred to the Iraqi government and put ‘government’ in inverted commas. In the light of the Baathists’ rule, these inverted commas are an insult to Iraqi people who voted. The Socialist Worker gleefully reports on Hesbollah’s activity in Lebanon, calling them the ‘anti-US resistance’, and implying that the government is trying to undermine Lebanon’s ability to fight Israel. In fact Hesbollah won’t participate in democratic politics, and for them to expect that they can squat in Lebanon, is - how to put it - highly irregular. Also on the SWP site we have ‘Israel - created by terrorism‘, which is a one-sided and inflammatory anti-Zionist piece about the Nakba which misses out the pre-existing Jewish population, the Arab Revolt or the Holocaust.

So, a cruddy coalition full of beautifully-intentioned people? If you have to keep shrugging your shoulders at your fellow coalition members because they’re embarrassing and worse then there’s probably a good case for striking out with a smaller group. Because thoughtful as the man was, I think it’s sensible to place more stock in a coalition’s web site and the web sites of the constituent parts than an individual you meet at a talk. I’m willing to talk about anti-imperialism but screw Stop the War and its negative agenda.

Matt’s and my donation eventually went to the Disaster Emergency Committee for Myanmar. The coordinated response to the Myanmar junta’s fatal negligence of its stricken millions is too-slowly coalescing round the UN ‘duty to protect’ resolution. Nick Cohen comments. My MP Lee Scott’s response was succinctly fatalistic - he did not give me to believe that he would be looking for opportunities to coordinate internationally on getting aid and expertise into Myanmar.

There is also a parallel call for donations straight to Myanmar’s monks on the basis that they are best-placed to distribute the aid. Matt and I gave to the experts at DEC in the hope that they are equipped to make good decisions about getting my donation to its recipients, via the monks if need be.

Like Israel, but more vulnerably, Lebanon is a little-noted democracy in the Middle East. For a while it looked as if Hesbollah was attempting a putsch in Beirut, but either they failed or they were flexing their muscles to intimidate the government of Fouad Siniora. Despite their aspirations to power, Hesbollah operatives function outside government. This week marked a turning point in their relations with Lebanon - they turned the guns, which they swore would only ever be aimed only at Israel, inwards. The Observer encourages us to view this as Sunni-Shiah infighting - what about Lebanon’s Christians and democrats? Hesbollah political aid Ali Hassan Khalil is calling this ‘civil disobedience‘ but 24 people have died. Anyway, what does Lebanon owe to Hesbollah, who spurn the democratic government, who are the only terrorist group permitted to keep its weapons after Israel pulled out of Lebanon, who promptly turned them onto Northern Israel again leading Israel to attack in 2006 with enormous collatoral deaths and damage. Hesbollah say that Siniora’s is a puppet government of the imperialists. Nasrallah is reported to have said last Friday that the ruling coalition were “Israelis dressed in suits and speaking Arabic”. This is the rationale - calling the elected government proxy Israelis amounts in Hesbollah language to license to wreck and kill them. I know who I support - the democrats every time.

Yesterday Matt and I took ourselves to the seaside. It was originally going to be our local Southend but then curiosity impelled us to the nationalist monocultural stronghold of Frinton-on-Sea and from there a walk either north on the marshes to Walton-on-the-Naze or south to Clacton. While waiting for the toilet on the train I asked the man next to me if he was going to Frinton - no, he was going to Clacton where his brother lives. He intimated that the men of Clacton are dangerously belligerent of a weekend evening. We eventually struck out for Clacton along a beach strewn with bathers, loungers, lovers, comic toddlers and, once outside Frinton, highly entertaining dogs. At Clacton the boys had that gelled baby-bird hair I love and everybody was lobster red. It was more like a Barkingside-on-Sea but prettier, trashier and more faded all at the same time. Nobody was fighting. On station road we saw a staggering number of adjacent estate agents lining both sides of the road for 100 metres at least.

When we got back into Stratford that evening I thought it but it was Matt who said that he much more at home in St Ratford than he did in Frinton / Clacton. Me too. In Stratford everybody is an outsider. St Ratford is cosmopolitan and so, increasingly, is Barkingside. That makes things better. My home nestles between Nigerian Catholics (from two different tribes); they butt onto the Hindu Patels. Across the road is an English / African family. Jews next to them. Ghanaians beyond. South Africans the other side. Then Alan who is straight up English. And so on. The last thing I see before the road bends is a flagpole. The man in that house flies the George Cross and, occasionally, a jolly roger.

In Stratford gaggles of adolescents bounded and skittered round the shopping centre chattering like starlings. The shopping centre at Stratford is a thoroughfare between the station and the theatre and cinema. It’s warm, dry, lit and protected by CCTV. It’s a good place to spend time with your friends at night if there’s nowhere else and you’re too young for the pub - especially in winter.

On the Central Line on the way back I noticed the Dome of the Rock winking at me from an abandoned copy of the Guardian. It is Israel’s anniversary and in the stuff I read this has mostly been the occasion for intense vilification of Israel (and Israel’s advocates). Disappointingly the author of the piece was one of Israel’s most serious attackers, Jacqueline Rose. I am still getting through the piece - it seems she cherry-picks and appropriates self-critical Israeli fictional writing and presses them into the service of her pre-existing anti-Zionist narrative. It’s worth a response, but I can’t do it now.

A large proportion of the attacks on Israel - and these days when the attacks emanate from people outside Israel or Palestine, and unless they explicitly dissociate themselves, I’m inclined to lump them together whether they be on matters of Israel’s policies and strategies or on its very existence - have bad reasons.

Some people believe that if you can solve the Israel/Palestine conflict you will take the energy out of Al Qaeda’s terrifying war against democracy, women’s emancipation, free speech, &tc. Or failing that, if you can distance yourself from anything that might be construed as support for Israel, you won’t cop any flak yourself. This leads to a lot of ostentatious appeasement in the form of loud condemnation of Israel.

Others like the key people in Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Jewish Anti-Zionists, Jewish Socialist Group and Jacqueline Rose’s organisation, Independent Jewish Voices, feel that Israel reflects badly on them as Jews and tarnishes their reputation in society. This also leads to showy condemnation of Israel, but this time ostentatiously as Jews. Most Jewish identity pro-Palestinian activists feel personally responsible for the way Israel behaves towards Palestinians. Why this should lead to undermining Israel’s existence rather than certain of Israel’s policies and strategies (about which very few of Israel’s detractors inform themselves sufficiently to comment on) is complicated - may be to do with an idealised view of Jews as morally superior, may be to do with an overarching anti-imperialist bent which finds simplistic expression in acts against Israel, may be a personal attempt, as a Jew, to personally move beyond the Holocaust, may be to do with something else.

Wherever intense scrutiny of Israel is mainstream, as in Britain, all of the above lead to an intensification of scrutiny on Jews which manifests itself in political tests and accusations of that Jews lie and obfuscate to defend Israel from a scrutiny which everybody else perceives as entirely justified. Only last night somebody told me that if I wasn’t Jewish I would feel differently about the Israel-Palestine conflict. This kind of insinuation of untrustworthiness presents Jews with at least two possible responses. You can take the IJV, JfJfP, JSG, JAZ option and try to mollify or defuse your detractors by proving that you personally, or you and your friends, are not biased. You can ostentatiously organise activity which looks to be against the interest of the clan you have been lumped together with. I don’t like that response because it doesn’t address the racism of the detractors. It accepts the charge of Jewish clannishness and seeks distance. Moreover it has no understanding for clannishness and no sense of social factors. This is a very sanctimonious response.

I think it was Hoffer who wrote in ‘The True Believer’ that mass movements can’t survive without a devil. The international movement to support Palestinians is one such movement, as illustrated by the slogans of the boycotters at the Turin Book Fair this week (’Boycott Israel - Support Palestine’). This climate of demonisation is the reason I take the other choice of response, which is to try to challenge ad hominem arguments about the motives or trustworthiness of those Jews who speak up against the demonising vilification of Israel.

Is that what he said as he criticised veganism for not being as climate friendly as you would think?

I had half an ear on Costing the Earth on BBC Radio 4 this evening. This programme attempts to raise awareness about various anthropogenic environmental situations, including debunking eco-myths.

Today’s was A Meaty Subject. This is a poor response - I haven’t honed the arguments, but there’s more to eating animals than climate. Probably the first thing I can do is stick in a link to The Smiths’ Meat is Murder video:

That’s old now but not much has changed. And we know a lot more about animal emotions now than we did when The Smiths wrote that song.

The programme - from a climate change point it was good and all of it was interesting. It’s good to know how to weigh up environmental impact of different food choices. There was a top-ten (top four in fact) of green meat based on whether they survive in places where we can’t grow stuff, eat naturally occurring stuff we can’t eat and - particularly if they eat grain - efficiently convert plant energy to meat (the golden ratio is 1kg of grain to 1kg of meat) - sheep won, with intensively-reared chickens in second place. But the language used was intolerable for anybody who sees animals as not food, or more than food. This programme viewed them as commodities.

They were out for the vegetarians (for the same reasons I became vegan - a fundamental ethical blindspot that milk needs calves, half calves are male and the only use humans can get out of male calves is meat). They were also out for the vegans on the grounds that a vegan diet would alter our grazed landscape and reduce biodiversity by doing away with ruminant animals, that ploughing releases carbon and that we have to import soya (this vegan doesn’t live on soya, this vegan doesn’t want to do away with animals or tamper with anybody’s precious landscape).

They took a cold look at intensive farming without once mentioning animal welfare. They were talking about animals as if they’re food. Nothing is food until its been killed and prepared, and you should never kill animals, or cause them to be killed, unless you need to in order to survive. The case that we in Britain need to isn’t being made. We have enough plant foods and yet we imprison, exploit and kill sentient animals for no reason except we are like their flavour and respect very few of their rights and certainly not the fundamental one.

It was terrible to hear animal farming dealt with as just a matter of carbon and when a lecture started about how we should eat offal for the environment omitting that not to eat the entire animal is sticking two fingers up to people suffering famine and is also akin to killing an elephant just for its tusks, I switched it off in disgust. I don’t care that the programme is called ‘Costing the Earth’ - you can’t draw those kinds of lines round the way humans deal with animals, which is inhumanely.

I found myself caught grotesquely between trying to engage with the programme on its own terms - the hegemonic terms of omniverous climate worries - and trying to cope with the sense that raising and eating animals as we eat animals might be normal - slavery was normal once, so were ritual sacrifices - but it’s intolerable. Animals feel. We have no right but might and wit, and when it comes to life, death and exploitaton of humans, those are usually rejected as rights. Are we so confident that the animals we are currently raising and killing are all that different from us?

The end of the programme particularly revealed its superficiality. The Oxford researcher was confronted with a choice - beef burger or veggie burger. He chose beef on the grounds that we could control its production. We were never told what the veggie burger was made from. Nuts and seeds, which have a long shelf-life and can be locally grown? Who knows.

The presenter had begun the programme by telling us that the only carbon-neutral life was, uh, death. The message I took away was a small amount of very mild scare-mongering about what might happen if we moved away from meat, and no solid case for eating it. I hope the Vegan Society will respond, rigorously.

Hundreds of thousands of people are in dire need in Myanmar. The death toll of Cyclone Nargis is rising sharply as news travels from the remote Irrawaddy delta area that entire villages, most of which are built from bamboo, have been swept away. The generals who run Myanmar have appealed for international material assistance but insist on mediating it themselves - they don’t want the personnel who come with the aid. Meanwhile they’re drastically restricting the activities of aid workers by imposing visas and permits. At least one specialist UN team is held up in Bangkok.

“I have not had anything from the government nor do I expect anything from the government … All I need is my hut. I want a place to stay,” said one survivor.

On Radio 4’s ten o’clock news a representative from The Burma Campaign said that this humanitarian disaster needs a coordinated international response, criticised Ban Ki Moon’s neglect in demanding the entry of foreign aid agencies, asserted that the junta will steal aid channelled through it, and advised pressure on international governments to insist on a coordinated international effort based on cooperation not unconditional handouts to a regime that has zero concern for the needs of its population.

I searched for a way to advance this. Oxfam requests donations to its general emergency fund. The Red Cross has a Myanmar Cyclone Appeal, as do Islamic Relief and Save the Children. The Guardian has recommendations. Red R’s press release has been pulled. It’s pretty chaotic and I haven’t been able to find a coordinated effort to get specialist aid workers into Myanmar. Hello, UN? EU?

For now Write to Your MP asking him/her to broach the issue.

Dutch ones, from the air.

HT EJB.

I couldn’t lie to myself or the neighbours any more and Matt had never even tried. We didn’t have a wild garden, we had a very neglected garden. So today we acted as follows:

• in the front, pruned the buddleia (for the butterflies) into a tree rather than a behemoth as formerly
• revealed that my rosemary and lavender alternating hedge, planted only last year and previously hidden by buddleia, has bushed out nicely; pruned, top-dressed and watered that
• pruned the waxy leaved Essex shrub with the red flowers
• watered and top-dressed the front roses and bleeding heart plant. Eyed the greenfly but did nothing.
• avoided secateuring the largest and hairiest caterpillar I’ve seen in a long while
• cleared away the crip packets, KFC cartons and fox dung
• asked next door’s boys to mind the iris buds when they go for their ball
• in the back pruned, top-dressed, weeded and watered the baby yew hedge
• cleared and dug over last year’s tomato plants from the vegetable patch to plant clover (this year will be fallow until later when we’ll plant some late leaves)
• weeded the herb bed
• pruned, top dressed and watered the vines and the broom
• pruned the stuff which is trying to get inside the house
• cleared the enormous bramble
• filled many bags with the green prunings which can’t fit on the compost.

We didn’t mow the lawn (which also needs aerating and other assistance), the eucalyptus needs to be lopped and the hops are looking menacing. This time of year it’s a bit of a challenge to fight it all off. But it’s teeming with life - I saw so many different animals today (the most exciting of which was a frog). The only slight blot on the landscape Matt was frightened by two garden gnomes under the bramble, one of which is large enough to pose quite a threat.

I forgot to sow rocket. Will do that right now.

London in May, lily-of-the-valley follows the last of the bluebells. In the conceptual piece below Ken Livingstone, stubborn and thick-skinned, ceremonially hands over control to his chauvinist successor Blue Boris Johnson. The pale and precipitous sides of the fireplace symbolise both political careers as well as London’s chalk aquifer.